Last week we had an amazing conference called the Word of Mouth Crash Course. It was a fantastic day, the third in a series.
But it wasn’t as big as we expected, and we discovered a critical reason why:
We changed the name of the event — it used to be called Word of Mouth Supergenius — without any testing.
Here’s what happened — people thought that it was an online course instead of a live conference. The word course implied online training to many people. We also failed to use certain trigger words that indicate that something is a live event: Summit, Expo, Conference, Boot Camp, etc.
Many of our most loyal fans had no idea that there was a conference, even though they definitely saw the promotion. It just didn’t connect somehow. They were disappointed when they found out later, and we lost a huge opportunity to serve them.
Lesson: Test, test, test any new name. You’re not going to know how it works until you start using it.